The Lead

Amarjeet Sohi has been named Minister of Natural Resources, replacing Jim Carr just as the federal government finalizes its purchase of the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline and its related assets.

Minister Sohi was previously on the infrastructure portfolio and admitted in an interview Wednesday that he has “big shoes to fill.” Sohi will have to wrap up Ottawa’s purchase of Trans Mountain for $4.5 billion and will likely have to find investors for the additional $6 billion it will cost to build the expansion. “It’s going to be a really challenging portfolio for him. Minister Sohi is now facing not only the fact that resources are clearly hugely important in Canada, but it’s also intertwined with the environmental agenda of the government,” explained Martha Hall Findlay, CEO of the Canada West Foundation. Sohi’s appointment also comes amid major reformations in Canada’s environmental assessment regime, the Financial Post reports.

In Opinion

According to a 2013 report, watching an hour of video per week on either a smartphone or tablet consumed the same amount of energy as “two new domestic fridges.” If the trend maintains its pace, energy used by digital consumption — largely on the data-centre side of things — will soon have a bigger global warming impact than the entire aviation industry. John Harris argues these points further in his column for the Guardian.